This is a (sort of) follow up to yesterday’s note on élan—because quite possibly someone who does things with élan also has ‘insouciance.’
Clearly this is another French-sourced word (recorded from 1799).
I first came across this in descriptions of the movies of Bing Crosby.
Yes, I know that’s now ancient history, but bear with me. Bing’s earliest career in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s—including the Big Broadcast movies, the Rhythm movies (‘Rhythm on the Range’, ‘Rhythm on the River’, ‘Doctor Rhythm, ‘Pennies of Heaven’ and the rest) followed by the Road movies (with Bob Hope)—all had Bing playing much the same character, a sort of version of himself, that had critics saying his dominant on-screen characteristic was ‘insouciance.’
The word is pronounced, in English, as on-sooss-ee-yonss (that’s me abandoning all the usual phonetic guidelines, I hope you can cope!)
The dictionaries say that it means, ‘a relaxed, happy way of behaving without feeling worried or guilty’ (Cambridge English Dictionary); or ‘a cheerful feeling of not worrying or caring about anything' (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English).
If you’ve ever seen those ancient Bing Crosby movies on late night TV, you’ll recognise this at once.
These days, of course, no one would worry about such as awkward sounding French-sourced word; they would just call such a performance being ‘cool.’
And one movie critic made an interesting comparison between the ‘insouciant’ Bing character in the 1930s and the ‘cool’ character played by Elvis in all those 1960s movies (sadly, many of them just studio ‘quickies’ designed to make a buck).
The critic pointed out that Elvis was always the ‘coolest’ person in his movies, just as Bing was the most ‘insouciant’ in his.
And the producer of many of those Bing films in the 30s and those Elvis movies in the 60s was the same man—Hal. B. Wallis!
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